Starr Sackstein is a secondary educator and school leader in New York. She is the author of several books on education, on topics such as going gradeless, peer feedback, and blogging.

Traditional Report Cards Are Obsolete

Depending on where a person teaches, a school district can dictate how often report cards and progess reports will be distributed to students and parents to "communicate learning" and keep families abreast of what is happening in the classroom.

However, the idea of what report cards are and what they actually do is fatally flawed from the beginning.

Communication about learning needs to be ongoing in a meaningful way and paper report cards being mailed home or sent home with students or uploaded onto an online portal as a PDF a few times a year just doesn't cut it.

Aside from the infrequency of sharing, the content shared is often out of date and/or not a good representation of what students know and can do.

For example, in high school, each subject teacher gets one line to present a letter grade or a number grade (sometimes without any kind of precision or explanation as to what the criteria is) and up to three pre-written comment codes to help explain the grade. Often, these pre-written comments don't have anything to do with quality of work or skill level, but focus on behavior and compliance.

There are other pieces of information that can be provided such as number of absences and/or midterm or final exam grades.

The act of sharing information isn't the issue, it's what we share and how we share it. Many elementary schools use standards based report cards now that focus more heavily on skill mastery and narratives written by the teacher. This is an effective means of communication, but it only happens three times a year in many schools.

There are also parent/teacher conferences, but these conferences often just review the report card rather than go deeper and share more important information that can really help students grow as learners. Ironically, many times the students are not even involved in these conversations which takes the most important factor out of the equation.

Many online systems now make it possible for teachers and schools to share information with parents and students regularly keeping families in the loop about learning, often assignment by assignment with narrative feedback. There are many iterations of how this can happen, but we need to be asking ourselves more importantly what and why we are communicating.

In an ideal world, teachers would be empowering students regularly with feedback that isn't aligned with grades but rather with mastery standards, offering multiple opportunities for growth.

Here are things we can do differently today:

Stop putting grades on everything students turn in. We can provided actual actionable feedback without labeling the quality of it with a quantity.

Offer more opportunities for students to get feedback from peers and from the teacher.

Invite parents to be a part of the process and involve them in the learning in an on-going way by making out of school learning an integral part of the practice we do every day.

Teach students the language of the standards and be transparent in what and why they are learning different skills and content. Make sure the reason isn't because it's on a test.

Have students reflecting regularly so you can get a fuller read on how much they are actually learning. Often their work and performance won't tell the whole story.

Allow students to be involved in the assessment process, so they can choose how and what they are learning.

Be clear about success criteria and help students understand where they measure up.

Truly listen to students and be flexible that learning happens at different paces for everyone and often in different ways.

When we think about preparing students for the world we live in, accountability is important, but teaching students to be accountable in a way that works for them that also helps us know where we need to adjust practice to better suit their needs.

Report cards were a solution once that probably made some form of communication easier. However, the kind of communication it fosters sends the wrong message about what learning should be. As we shift the mindset about learning, we also have be mindful about the subconscious messages we send systemically about what learning actually is.

How can you better communicate with students and families about student learning that makes the outcome more meaningful? Please share

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